3. Onscreen Fundamentals
Kpackage has two panels. The left panel displays
a tree of the installed packages, the left panel displays information on
the installed packages..
3.1 Drag and Drop
Kpackage makes use of the KDE Drag and Drop protocol.
This means that you can drag and drop packages onto Kpackage to open them.
Dropping a file onto the "Find File" dialog
will find the package that contains the file.
3.2 Managing Packages with the
package tree
When Kpackage is started normally (that is it has
not been invoked via drag and drop and has not been given any parameters)
it displays two panels with the package tree on the left, this tree shows
installed packages and optionally unistalled and updating packages as well.
The package tree show the package name, package
size, the version and in the case of uninstalled packages that would
update an installed package the version of the installed package.
Selecting a package from the tree displays information
about it in the right panel and allows:
-
Displaying the status information on the package
-
Seeing which files are included in an installed
package, selecting a file from the list will open it using the file manager
-
Verifying files in a package, files that exist are
marked with a tick, files that don't with a cross.
-
Uninstalling an installed package
-
Installing an uninstalled package
The package tree can operate in two modes:
-
in Single Select mode selecting one packages
deselects the previous one
-
in Multiple select mode many packages can
be selected and these can be installed or uninstalled as a group
3.3 Integrating uninstalled
packages in the tree
Kpackage can deal with collections of uninstalled
packages from RPM or Debian distributions.
For RPM packages Kpackage can read a directory
containing packages and add these to the package tree as either new or
updated packages. It is possible to examine or install these packages from
the package tree. By default the information about the packages is extracted
from the standard format of the file names and so it is necessary to use
the "Examine" button in Single select mode to see the full
description, it is possible though to set an option so that for local directories
each package file is read, this is slower but gives a full description.
For Debian packages ipackage directories
can be handled in the same way as with RPM packages but it is also possible
to use the Packages files that provide the directories for Debian
distributions. The location of the the Debian distribution is specified
along with the Packages files for the parts of the distribution
that are of interest, those packages are then added to the package
tree and can be examined or installed. If "dselect" program is being used
then the file /var/lib/dpkg/available can be used as a Packages
file
that describes the distribution that dselect uses.
For remote directories and package files
(ie those fetched via FTP) Kpackage will do caching, the packages are cached
in ~/.kpackage and the directories in ~/.kpackage/dir
NOTE: for the handling of remote
(FTP) directories to work KFM must not have the "FTP Proxy" set.
in the Browser Settings.
3.4 Installing Packages
To install a package you can
-
locate the package you wish to install in
kfm, drag it onto a running copy of Kpackage
-
click on a package file in kfm and start a
new copy of Kpackage
-
use on the Open menu items in Kpackage
-
selecting an uninstalled package in the package
tree
In Single select mode the Examine
button will open the packfage file (fetching it from a remote source if
necessary) and
display install options on the left panel
and package information on the right panel.
In Multiple select mode the
Install
button
pop up a dialog of install options, when install is selected in this dialog
any
remote packages are fetched and then all
the selected packages are installed.
RPM and Debian packages are handled slightly
differently, RPM pages are installed by the Kpackage program while with
Debian packages the DPKG utility is invoked in a KVT window (this allows
interaction if required).
3.5 Uninstalling Packages
Packages can be uninstalled but selecting
them in the package tree and using the Uninstall button, this brings
up a popup with the unistall options, the Uninstall button in the popup
causes the packages to be uninstalled.